ESS 4.2 Virus Scan versus F-Prot 6.0.9

I was surprised when I installed ESET on my XP desktop (getting paranoid with all the new attack vectors even though I use it little) that it was slower than F-Prot ('My Computer' scan 48 minutes for F-prot versus 62 minutes for ESET). Reason? ESET scanned 275,190 files/objects while F-Prot scanned 54,153. Is one fibbing?

There are two possibilities: the other AV didn't scan certain archives internally or it uses optimization techniques for faster scanning. Perhaps you might want to try out the new ESS 5 beta announced here to see if it performs even better.

I was surprised when I installed ESET on my XP desktop (getting paranoid with all the new attack vectors even though I use it little) that it was slower than F-Prot ('My Computer' scan 48 minutes for F-prot versus 62 minutes for ESET). Reason? ESET scanned 275,190 files/objects while F-Prot scanned 54,153. Is one fibbing?

No, when I installed it I did a full scan. Then one more before I noticed it took longer. F-prot is set to scan compressed files. More testing needed but I am happy now, I think, that I put ESET on this Win XP PC. Observation: all other malware suites have positive problems, but ESET if anything has a negative problem: it is so out of the ordinairy that one doubts it. But a double negative is a positive, right?

No, when I installed it I did a full scan. Then one more before I noticed it took longer. F-prot is set to scan compressed files. More testing needed but I am happy now, I think, that I put ESET on this Win XP PC. Observation: all other malware suites have positive problems, but ESET if anything has a negative problem: it is so out of the ordinairy that one doubts it. But a double negative is a positive, right?

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Full scan times are not important in my opinion, if it takes 2 hours or longer to complete one then it's an annoyance, but I don't care wheter it takes 20 or 50 minutes, as long as it checks the system thoroughly for malware it's good.
Better to look at speed impact on daily computer use, or if you're a bit more technical, Disk I/O and CPU time, because RAM usage doesn't say much either and there are ways to hide RAM usage.